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Who is this guy?

Jason Freyer is a youth pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, PA. He enjoys his job so much that he has decided to spend countless hours of his free time writing about it in the new modern medium of weblog, or blog. That brings us here. Welcome to the blog of J, or in its condensed version, J-Blog. Jason writes this blog to be by youth pastors, for youth pastors, but watch with amazement as he dives into other topics as worship leading, preaching, politics, the Pittsburgh sports scene, or whatever else happens to be on his mind. Jason lives with his wife Sarah and their two dogs Marley and Melvin. This is some of the finest third person writing he's done in a while.

Every vacation seems to come with a beach read. This vacation was also the first to have my new iPad with me, so I did what you would expect of any youth pastor with an inability to focus would do: I spent the first three days trying to decide what to read.

But then, once I got settled in, I landed on Matthew Paul Turner's book Hear No Evil. The first chapter alone is worth the entire price of the book. The only complaint I had was that at times Turner is so funny I laughed out loud, which made reading the book in public a bit of a challenge.

Turner walks us through his upbringing in a Fundamentalist Baptist church which seemed to have a unique relationship with music and the blossoming Christian music industry. It was a little difficult to read through some of the chapters that dealt so heavily with his baptist up bringing, as it was incredibly different from my own Presbyterian Heritage. It's weird to think that there might such a thing as denominational culture shock, but there absolutely is.

Hear No Evil is an absolute must read for anyone with even the slightest hopes of making it in the Christian Music Industry. As someone who spent some time on the inside, Turner exposes some of the more hypocritical nature of the industry. There are lots of stories in the book that I don't want to spoil, but let's leave it at this: Christian music isn't all sunshine and rainbows.

After I finished this book, I was so in love with Turner's writing style that I picked up a few of his other books on my Kindle for iPad app, and I'm sure I'll be reading them soon. But in the meantime, I highly recommend following him on twitter (@jesusneedsnewpr) and checking out his blog (be warned: he sometimes gets a little edgy...but then again I like edgy!). As for Hear No Evil, I give it two thumbs way the heck up!